Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a manipulation monitoring device and a manipulation monitoring method that perform a control operation and monitoring of a plant.
Priority is claimed on Japanese Patent Application No. 2011-062759, filed Mar. 22, 2011, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Description of the Related Art
All patents, patent applications, patent publications, scientific articles, and the like, which will hereinafter be cited or identified in the present application, will hereby be incorporated by reference in their entirety in order to describe more fully the state of the art to which the present invention pertains.
A distributed control system (DCS), in which an in-situ device called a field device (a measuring instrument or a manipulator) and a manipulation monitoring device for performing control and monitoring of the field device are connected to each other, for example, via a communication bus, has been conventionally built to realize an advanced automatic operation in a plant. In this distributed control system, a current measurement value, a target value, an alarm value and the like of a process realized in the plant are displayed on the manipulation monitoring device, and control of the field device is performed by the manipulation monitoring device based on an instruction from an operator (an operator of a plant) referencing such a display.
The display of the measurement value, the target value or the like of the process in the manipulation monitoring device is performed for each manipulation monitoring screen (graphic screen) prepared in advance. Here, the graphic screen refers to a screen that is prepared for each manipulation monitoring area set in a plant and graphically displays manipulation monitoring targets (e.g., a valve, a reactor or a tank) arranged in the manipulation monitoring area. Further, the manipulation monitoring area is often set based on an individual process in a series of processes realized in the plant.
Here, when the control operation and monitoring of the plant are performed, processes before and after any process in a series of processes realized in the plant may need to be simultaneously monitored or a plurality of processes may need to be globally monitored. In such a case, the operator should manipulate the manipulation monitoring device to cause a plurality of graphic screens to be displayed on the manipulation monitoring device, and perform monitoring while switching the respective graphic screens displayed on the manipulation monitoring device. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application, First Publication No. 2008-171166 discloses a conventional manipulation monitoring device that allows an intuitive manipulation and easy reuse of information.
Incidentally, the conventional manipulation monitoring device is capable of displaying the graphic screen based on the instruction of the operator as described above, but the operator should manually instruct the graphic screen that is to be displayed and manually adjust a display position or a size of the graphic screen. That is, in the conventional manipulation monitoring device, a new graphic screen instructed by the operator is displayed without taking content, a display position, or the size of a currently displayed graphic screen into consideration.
Accordingly, in order to simultaneously monitor preceding and subsequent processes or globally monitor a plurality of processes using the conventional manipulation monitoring device, the operator must manually adjust the display position or the size of the graphic screen for each process in consideration of a relationship between the processes. Thus, in the conventional manipulation monitoring device, monitoring in consideration of a plurality of processes requires a very complex task, degrading convenience and task efficiency. Further, when such a complicated task is forced, it takes a long time to find causes of problems generated in the plant and thus response is delayed.